Taking a page out of Lawdog’s book and posting some teaser chapters. Let me know what you guys think!
“Your teeth are chattering.”?"
I ignored the alien voice in the back of my head and kept my eyes focused on the house I was staking out. Ignoring it was about as easy as ignoring the cold—and just as annoying.
“And here we sit, in a perfectly good automobile, with a functioning heater…that is turned off for some inexplicable reason.”
Like I said—annoying.
“We’ve been over this, Meridia,” I said aloud, as I set down my camera and scooped up my Thermos, opening it. “The goal of a stakeout is to observe our target without being seen or noticed. Sitting in an idling car on a public street in the middle of the night defeats the whole purpose.”
“So would us freezing to death.”
“I’m f-fine,” I replied.
Right after I said that, my trembling hands betrayed me, and my Thermos cup fell into my lap. Nuclear-hot coffee soaked through my pants, eliciting a pained yelp from yours truly as I leapt up from my seat, banging my head of the roof of my Jeep.
The smarmy voice in my head chuckled. “Shouting and self-inflicted injuries don’t help, either.”
My lap was on fire. I ripped open the lid to the center console with a little more force than was probably necessary, and grabbed some napkins to clean up. Also checked the camera while I was at it. It looked like it was okay, unlike my poor jeans. “Neither does all the damn chit-chat,” I said, trying to clean up the mess. “The remedy for that is silence, so shut your hole.”
“I am incorporeal. I do not make noise.”
“Too bad. Also means I can’t nail you with my Thermos.”
The coffee slopped over more than just my lap and seat cushion. In the passenger seat was a manila folder with my case notes in it, which was, I noted with annoyance, now covered in stains of dark brown liquid. I did my best to clean up the folder and its contents, swearing a blue streak all the while.
...the steam coming from my breath was just a coincidence, I swear.
The case was simple enough. An Airman stationed at nearby Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson had suspected his wife was fooling around on him while he was on a temporary duty assignment down in the Lower 48. I’d been hired to verify this suspicion and, if his hunch was correct, gather evidence of Jody’s visit for the divorce attorney. My client had a modest split-level home off-post near the Alaska Botanical Garden. A little bit of prep work, and I found myself here, parked in a heavily shaded spot off of Kingston Drive on the far east end of Anchorage, with nothing but the voice in my head for company.
“Someone’s coming.”
I looked up from my notes, still soaked with the finest crap drip coffee I could afford, as a newer Toyota Tacoma pulled up from the opposite end of the street and stopped right in front of the house I was monitoring. A quick glance back at my notes informed me that this vehicle did not belong to my client, nor was it a vehicle known by my client to regularly visit the house.
“Hel-lo, Jody,” I said, pulling out my camera.
The Municipality of Anchorage, despite being the largest city in the state, still has a much more rural feel than most other major American cities I’ve been to. Once out of the downtown area and off of major streets, sidewalks are rare, French Drains and open ditches are more prevalent than full stormwater systems, and the treelines are thick enough to serve as fencing in most neighborhoods. East Anchorage in particular is thick with willows, birch, spruce, and pines, once you get off the heavily developed parts of Muldoon Road. Great for wildlife, and the darker elements of society—especially yours truly.
Unfortunately, the autumn chill was working against me. Cameras have trouble taking pictures through a half-fogged windshield. Normal photographers would simply get out of the car—an action that would blow most normal private investigators’ cover on a stakeout.
The operative word there being normal.
I closed my eyes as an oily blackness pooled at my feet and migrated up, covering my feet. The harsh autumn chill dissipated as the roiling substance, dark as anthracite coal, rose up towards my face. The change was complete in under a second, and I opened my eyes on a world that felt sharper and clearer.
The face I saw in the rearview mirror was no longer my own; instead, a humanoid face, barely visible in the dark even with improved night vision, greeted me in the reflection. The only prominent features I could see were the pair of glowing yellow eyes—Meridia’s—staring back at me. I looked away, took a firm grip on the camera and my cane, and disappeared into the shadows under my dashboard. A moment later, I surfaced from a dark spot in the trees next to my Cherokee. I popped the lens cap off the camera, laid it on the hood, and tucked in behind the fender and the passenger door for concealment.
“You’re not going to change back?”
I have hangups about wearing Meridia’s form in public, absent a good reason to do so. As a private eye, I prefer to keep a low profile in general, but if somebody discovered the shadow creature bound to me and what she could do, I’d end up shackled away in a government lab somewhere for the rest of my life. However, it was dark, I was in concealment, and the only other person I could see out and about at this hour was the well-groomed gentleman getting out of the Tacoma up the street, so the odds of me getting noticed at all were pretty low. And I had other reasons not to be standing outside as myself.
“It’s freaking cold out, and my clothes are wet,” I replied. “Hypothermia and trembling hands do not make for good photography.”
“…Fair enough.”
Being able to turn into a semi-corporeal being has its perks.
The mystery visitor pulled a bouquet of roses and a bottle of some sort out of his truck, and began walking towards the front door of the house. I took a couple of pictures, carefully watching him through the camera’s viewfinder…..until he suddenly stopped, peering curiously at some large bushes on the other side of the driveway. The look changed from inquisitive to alarmed in very short order, and the man took off running.
My natural instincts told me that the man saw some sort of animal, maybe a moose, or a small black bear. That was common enough up here—like I said, the area was still pretty friendly for wildlife habitat. Wild animal encounters happen all the time, here.
What wasn’t common was the beast that came out of the willow bushes. The creature looked to be about shoulder-height, relative to me—and I’m six foot, high on the bell curve for a woman. It had six legs, two sets of eyes that clustered at the center of its forehead, similar to a spider, a mottled dark brown hide, a set of ivory-black antlers twisted in a cruel mockery of a moose’s rack, and a set of similarly-colored tusks that curled up from its mouth, like a feral hog. Watching the thing advance upon the man, I realized that the tusks and antler tines were moving.
Meridia started talking as soon as I started muttering to myself:“That ain’t normal.”
Great minds think alike, and all that.
Now, the smart thing to do would’ve been to hop back into my car and get out of Dodge. Doing so would’ve meant leaving Jody to his fate, however, and while I wasn’t sure what the tuskacles and tineacles would do to the guy, it probably wasn’t anything good. Jody or no Jody, it didn’t feel right to just abandon the guy to Pigthulhu.
So much for going unnoticed.
Fortunately, Meridia agreed with me. Without me even thinking about it, I noticed my hair forming into a shadowy tendril of its own, digging into what would have been the opening of my coat and extracting my Smith & Wesson M&P40 from my appendix-carry holster. Another hair tendril gripped it by the barrel and held it out for me, grip-first.
Like I said, great minds think alike.
“Better make yourself scarce,” I told her, taking the pistol in hand, “This is going to draw attention.”
Meridia’s form evaporated, and with it, my shield against the chill. My clothes were still damp, and I could see my breath come out in plumes of steam again. I’d have to hurry and stop this thing before I started shivering again. Fortunately, Pigthulhu was only about thirty yards ahead of me, well within range, and I could use my Jeep to stabilize against. Which, since I was back to being puny little old me, was necessary—holding a firm two-handed grip on my gun meant I couldn’t hold onto my cane, and the pins and screws in my left leg were singing nearly as loud as the goosebumps on my skin were.
Jody made a beeline for his Tacoma, but tripped, just shy of the Tacoma’s passenger door. Pigthulhu bore down on him, tuskacles reaching for his legs.
I braced against the door of my Cherokee, rested the forearm of my support hand on the mirror, and put five shots into center mass, just as the Air Force and good ol’ Table II taught me to do. Pigthulhu stumbled and fell down, wailing in pain.
I didn’t allow it to get up and collect itself, continuing to fire at its woolly underbelly. My M&P had a stack magazine in it that held fifteen bullets, along with one in the pipe. I didn’t know many rounds of .40 S&W it was going to take to turn this thing into Lovecraftian bacon…..but I knew how many I was going to use.
After all, there ain’t no kill, like overkill.
Unfortunately, my gun locked back empty, and the porcine monstrosity refused to lie down like a good beastie. Instead, the bastard got back up, figured out that loud noise from that direction plus really big hurt equaled culprit, turned its beady little red eyes to me, and bellowed in challenge.
Uh-oh.
I dropped the spent magazine, fished another out of my coat pocket, slammed it home, and sent the slide forward, hoping like hell I could drop it before it charged me.
I brought the gun back up, only to find my target gone.
“On your right!”
Before Meridia’s warning could fully register, something caught my feet, yanking them out from under me. My head clipped the side of my Jeep, and I landed on my back with a pained grunt. A dazed glance over in the woods where she was telling me to look brought me into direct eye contact with the beast. Its front four feet were planted forward, and its tuskacles were wrapped around my ankles, pulling me towards that giant, grotesque snout. Teeth of obsidian glistened as Pigthulhu opened its disgusting mouth in a warbling snarl. It had me dead to rights, and it was pissed.
A series of holes appeared in its face and chest. It reeled in agony, letting loose with that terrible wail again. I remember idly thinking that the size of the holes, now leaking dark green viscous fluid, somewhat matched the diameter of a .40 caliber bullet, and it suddenly registered that I was looking at the creature through the night sights of my M&P. The slide was locked back, and smoke was emanating from the barrel.
“Pay attention.” Meridia was snarling. “Are you going to do something, or just lay there and get eaten while I do all the work?”
Great minds really are a treasure.
I really wasn’t feeling like being a menu item right then, so I shifted back to Meridia’s form and tried to disappear by rolling into the shadow of a nearby fallen tree, while Pigthulhu was distracted by all the hollow points under its skin. Only problem was, even after I changed, its tuskacles held fast, and right as I fell through the hole, pulled me right back out.
That shouldn’t have been possible.
A tineacle swatted at my hand and knocked my gun loose. Then more of the tineacles wrapped around my legs and waist, pulling me closer towards its maw. Those obsidian teeth were starting to look mighty intimidating.
I tried to grab hold of the tree by a branch that was sticking up. I formed a picture of grasping it in my head, and my hair surged forward, forming tendrils of its own to match my will. I made contact, and tried to pull myself out of Pigthulhu’s grip, but it backpedaled and shook its head. There was a sickening snap, and the next thing I knew, I was being hauled further back into the woods holding the portion of the broken willow branch that ripped off of the tree. The branch didn’t break cleanly, leaving me with a semi-sharpened chunk of forestry about the size of my wrist.
Pigthulhu raised me into the air, putting my face right in line with his open mouth.
High school softball fundamentals, don’t fail me now. I twisted my body as well as I could for the windup—damn, that hurt—and whirled the tangle of hair holding the willow branch towards his snout, swinging for the fences.
My line drive was immediately rewarded with another wail of pain. It dropped me, then backed into the shade of a tree and disappeared.
“It can shadowhop,” I whispered, trying not to let that sudden discovery cause me to panic. “Something from your neck of the woods?”
“Never seen it before,” Meridia said. She sounded about as rattled as I was at the moment. “Definitely not from my part of the world.”
Meridia is, for lack of a better term, a shadow creature. She’s one of the Oche, a race of interdimensional beings that live among and travel through the shadows. Dark areas and the world beyond are literally her domain. In the five or so years we’d been stuck with each other, I have never seen another living creature travel through the shadows like she could before, and to not only finally see one, but for her to lose her normal air of detached sangfroid upon encountering it, was mildly alarming.
I didn’t have time to worry about it, though. Meridia cried out, and I immediately looked up. Pigthulhu had surfaced in the upper reaches of a birch tree, and had jumped down in a feeble attempt to crush me flat. I closed my eyes and tried desperately to roll away.
There was a sickening squelch, a snapping sound, and the next thing I knew, I was under at least 300 pounds of mutant shadow pig. I opened my eyes again.
I wasn’t sure if I did it on instinct, or if Meridia decided to handle it, but one of us apparently had got smart in our desperation, and had stood one end of the broken branch on the ground, pointy end aimed up in the air.
Pigthulhu apparently saw it and tried to change his trajectory, which saved me from getting crushed like a grape, but it wasn’t fast enough to avoid being caught by the end of the branch, right under the chin. The improvised stake went straight through its jowl and, judging by how it stopped dead cold, must’ve gone up into its skull. Its hindquarters slapped the ground right next to me, hard enough to stir up a puff of fallen leaves and debris. The branch, which had been driven at least a foot into the ground from the impact, broke under the strain, and the beast flopped over, leaving its impaled head to rest across my upper body.
After what seemed like an eternity of lying on the forest floor, a flashlight appeared, coming from the direction of the street. Meridia noticed too, and quickly made herself scarce, which left me as being back to vanilla old me again. My head, my back, and my leg were all throbbing, and I was having difficulty trying to breathe under the weight of Pigthulhu’s corpse…until that weight abruptly disappeared, and I was suddenly staring at a harsh white light directly above my head. I had to squint and turn my face away from what I presumed to be the flashlight off a smartphone.
“Jesus,” said the phone’s owner, kicking the remains of the willow branch off of me. “Are you alright?”
“Absolutely not, but I’ll live,” I sighed, trying to squint through the light and see the phone’s owner. “Help me up, please?”
A pair of grasping hands reached down to assist me, and I came face-to-face with….
Jody.
Well. This was awkward.
“Um, thanks for the assist,” I breathed out, brushing myself off and trying to lean on my good leg. Damn it all, not only did I probably just blow this case, I got discovered, and rescued out from under the weight of that creature, by the asshole I’m supposed to be surveilling. Wonderful.
“I should be thanking you,” Jody went on to say. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be under…whatever the hell that thing is. How many shots did you put into it?”
“I lost count.” I kicked at the remnants of the branch stuck in Pigthulhu’s chest. “Not like it did anything other than piss it off, though. Gravity and a chunk of willow did all the work here.”
“Well, it’s appreciated, just the same,” Jody said, sticking out his hand. “Name’s Josh Highsmith.”
“Rhiannon Douglas,” I said, returning his handshake. Man had a heck of a grip on him; solid, but delicate enough to keep from crushing me. He smiled at me, before pausing and picking something up from the ground. “Is this your camera?”
Aw, crap. “Uh…yeah. Thanks.”
Jody looked at me appraisingly for a moment, before handing it back. “Something tells me you’re not out here to take pictures of the wildlife at this hour.”
I sighed. God, this was getting awkward. “No, no I am not.”
“Law enforcement?”
“Also no, though I sometimes work with them,” I said, mulling over my next words very carefully. “Listen, there’s something you should know, Josh—”
He let out a long exhale through his nose. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the house I was pulling up to, would it?”
“Depends on what you were planning to do at that house, Josh.”
Josh glanced back over in that direction. “Let me guess. She’s married, isn’t she?”
I pulled a pack of cigarillos out of my coat, pulling one out for myself and offering one to Josh. He declined with a shake of his head, but didn’t seem to mind me lighting up myself. “She probably won’t be, once I report back to my client.”
Josh stared off at the direction of the house for a long moment, before shaking his head. “I guess that’s what I get for picking my dates off of Tinder.” He turned to face me again, and his sigh of resignation and annoyance sounded sincere. “I honestly didn’t know.”
“I believe you,” I replied.
“Do me a favor?” he asked.
I exhaled, sending a plume of steam and smoke out into the night air. “Depends on the favor.”
“Could you not pass along my name to her husband?” Pleading eyes turned to meet mine. “I seriously had no idea she was married, and I’d rather not face adultery charges from my superiors. Tell him I’ll cover the fees you’re charging him in exchange.”
“Easy enough. I wasn’t planning on passing along names in any case,” I shrugged. “Though, your name’s probably going to come up in the police report when we call in…..uh…”
Josh followed my gaze, and immediately blanched. “Uh, what happened to the tentacle pig?”
Sure enough, where Pigthulhu had lain, there was nothing left but a mat of crushed wet leaves and sticks in a muddy depression in the dirt, covered in a substance that, had I not known better, somewhat resembled sludgy, used motor oil.
“Meridia, where the hell did it go?!”
She seemed just as bewildered as I was. “I honestly have no idea. I can’t sense it in The Void. Did it dissolve?”
We must’ve stared at that depression in the dirt in disbelief for at least a full minute, Josh occasionally looking back and forth from me to the remains in horror and confusion. Lights on some of the surrounding houses started coming on, and concerned neighbors popped up in windows, cell phones up to their ear.
“Uh, Rhiannon?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the depression in the ground. A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold passed through my body. “Yes, Josh?”
“Can they charge you for hunting out of season if the animal you shot has never been shot before
Image by ChatGPT. Story by me.
